Fyodor Dostoevsky Quotes
-
If they drive God from the earth, we shall shelter Him underground.
-
My God, a moment of bliss. Why, isn't that enough for a whole lifetime?
-
Perhaps I really regard myself as an intelligent man only because throughout my entire life I've never been able to start or finish anything.
-
What is the use of Christ's words, unless we set an example?
-
It sometimes happened that you might be familiar with a man for several years thinking he was a wild animal, and you would regard him with contempt. And then suddenly a moment would arrive when some uncontrollable impulse would lay his soul bare, and you would behold in it such riches, such sensitivity and warmth, such a vivid awareness of its own suffering and the suffering of others, that the scales would fall from your eyes and at first you would hardly be able to believe what you had seen and heard. The reverse also happens.
-
... you can never be sure of what has passed between husband and wife or lover and mistress.
-
I've long stopped worrying about who invented whom - God man or man God.
-
Talking nonsense is man's only privilege that distinguishes him from all other organisms.
-
At that point I ought to have gone away, but a strange sensation rose up in me, a sort of defiance of fate, a desire to challenge it, to put out my tongue at it. I laid down the largest stake allowe-four thousand gulden-and lost it. Then, getting hot, I pulled out all I had left, staked it on the same number, and lost again, after which I walked away from the table as though I were stunned. I could not even grasp what had happened to me.
-
Man, so long as he remains free, has no more constant and agonizing anxiety than find as quickly as possible someone to worship.
-
Humiliate the reason and distort the soul...
-
At such times I felt something was drawing me away, and I kept fancying that if I walked straight on, far, far away and reached that line where the sky and earth meet, there I should find the key to the mystery, there I should see a new life a thousand times richer and more turbulent than ours.
-
I have no self-respect. But can a man of acute sensibility respect himself at all?
-
I wanted to fathom her secrets; I wanted her to come to me and say: "I love you," and if not that, if that was senseless insanity, then...well, what was there to care about? Did I know what I wanted? I was like one demented: all I wanted was to be near her, in the halo of her glory, in her radiance, always, for ever, all my life. I knew nothing more!
-
There is no virtue if there is no immortality.
-
Life [had] replaced logic.
-
Is it really not possible to touch the gaming table without being instantly infected by superstition?
-
But to fall in love does not mean to love. One can fall in love and still hate.
-
Walking along the crowded row He met the one he used to know.
-
.. But do you understand, I cry to him, do you understand that along with happiness, in the exact same way, in perfectly equal proportion, man also needs unhappiness.
-
But I always liked side-paths, little dark back-alleys behind the main road- there one finds adventures and surprises, and precious metal in the dirt.
-
And so I ask myself: 'Where are your dreams?' And I shake my head and mutter: 'How the years go by!' And I ask myself again: 'What have you done with those years? Where have you buried your best moments? Have you really lived? Look,' I say to myself, 'how cold it is becoming all over the world!' And more years will pass and behind them will creep grim isolation. Tottering senility will come hobbling, leaning on a crutch, and behind these will come unrelieved boredom and despair. The world of fancies will fade, dreams will wilt and die and fall like autumn leaves from the trees. . . .
-
Because everyone is guilty for everyone else. For all the 'wee ones,' because there are little children and big children. All people are 'wee ones.' And I'll go for all of them, because there must be someone who will go for all of them.
-
By interpreting freedom as the propagation and immediate gratification of needs, people distort their own nature, for they engender in themselves a multitude of pointless and foolish desires, habits, and incongruous stratagems. Their lives are motivated only by mutual envy, sensuality, and ostentation.